Gone are the days of the inflexibly hierarchical and perplexedly divided labor of work. Modern businesses have already embraced automation as the primary method of both project and team management, thus ensuring optimal performance and certainty of a timely and successful delivery. For teams accustomed to leveraging the project management tools’ great potentials, disarrangement is already a thing of the past.

Rapid digitalization is a process that no prospective business can ignore any longer, and it’s nowhere of greater importance than in marketing. Being challenged by the unpredictability of modern customer behavior, the overly cluttered marketplace, as well as the growing demands of a dynamic online environment, this niche cannot but benefit from thorough project planning and effective team management.

Here are the advantages of a successfully managed marketing project that you should consider:

Task Management

Like all multitasking operations, marketing heavily relies on streamlining strategies, efficient scheduling, accurate budget analysis and flawless organisation. Ultimately, it demands a set of expertise that go way beyond basic, random and often limited advertising. From audience targeting and lead generation to audience conversion, marketing plays a responsible role of increasing company’s sales, supporting its brand’s statements and values and returning its initial investment in multiplied rates.

For no other reason but to run smoothly towards a previously set goal, marketing management needs an itinerary structure in which all steps are carefully examined and planned ahead, but also sturdy enough to support all potential derailments.

Document, Store & Share

Even though modern marketing strategies are considered digitally native, meaning that they are being projected, developed and executed primarily in an online environment, they still require not only careful calculation, but comprehensive documentation as well. In this niche, project planning routes are not significantly different than in general, and both initiation and work breakdown structure phases have to be documented in-detail.

And, since clarity of fundamentals and objectives are of the utmost importance here for establishing a firm scheduling structure, these complicated and seemingly inextricable commencing tasks would call for a lot of valuable time and effort if not automated with project management tools. With those, managers and teams can create, save, edit and share crucial documentation on the spot, without ever having to leave the platform. Relevant files can be attached to projects and milestones, discussed, archived or sent over to clients, and all that while staying perfectly safe and secure in the cloud.

Organize To Prioritize

Once objectives are defined in a way that promises utmost certainty of increasing traffic, email subscribers and customer conversion, project management tools offer features that allow both project managers and teams to get organized within seconds. After assessing each of your projects’ potentials, managers can prioritize ongoing projects or singular tasks with a convenient drag and drop action and mark the highest priority ones in order to keep them in the centre of their focus.

These tools are all about time efficiency, and these task managing features are not the only time-saving measures they provide. As aforementioned, automation is the very core of efficient management, which is why, for instance, options designed for recurring tasks – seasonal ads, campaigns or email newsletters – can drastically simplify and shorten your organizational efforts to a simple click of a button.

Get In Sync

Whether a misconception or not, marketing experts are not usually defined as good project managers. In most cases, they work independently or surrounded by a small team. They thrive in their creative mess, cluttered with sticky notes and buried with status report information. Nevertheless, a lack of real-time communication and timely coordination is still the biggest threat to successful project completion, which is something project management tools can effortlessly deal with.

Their shared calendars are thus not only a convenient way of always knowing what’s going on with particular tasks and subtasks, but also an effective solution for visualizing entire projects and their respective milestones. As such, this feature helps you organize, manage and read your project structure on two levels, with the first being an overview of all ongoing tasks, publish dates and hard deadlines, and the second providing an atomized glance on the day-to-day workflow, including your current “what’s coming up or due soon” reports.

Create Reports, Stay On Track

The structure behind project management is hardly sustainable without a firmly established chain of dependencies. Even when not mutually contingent, individual tasks need to be finished in time for the next ones to commence, which is why staying on track of all with them is of the utmost importance. This, off course, doesn’t apply only to managers, but to entire teams as well – timely reports are paramount for the overall workflow, given that they do serve as an assessment of the previous phase, notifying that the following one can begin.

Project management tools are brilliant for turning such actionable info into easy-to-read graphic presentations. Many of them support Gantt charts and progress report graphs, all of which provide a clear visual display of what has been accomplished so far and what is yet to be done. These updates can be shared further and submitted to department heads, stakeholders and clients as an official project report.

Track & Compare Expenditures

The whole point of effective marketing campaigns is to drive higher conversions and increase sales while making the lowest expenses possible. Proper budgeting is therefore essential for both marketing project planning and marketing project management. When established beforehand and vigilantly tracked during the project execution phase, cost estimation ensures that every individual task gets handled budget-wise, with stark heedfulness and that the project as a whole goes just as planned. Finally, project management promises a thorough analysis of the return of investment that each campaign should accomplish, thus identifying the most convertible and farthest-reaching ones.

Being designed with granny proof interfaces that make every piece of information easy to access, read and understand, project management tools provide a clear insight into budgetary spending at each given moment, with a possibility of comparing initially estimated expenditures with actual ones.

Team Management

Once your marketing project has been assessed and planned out from start to finish, it’s time for your team to get assigned with individual roles, tasks and responsibilities. Team management might just be the most delicate part of both the project planning and execution process, especially with complicated campaigns that require a big workforce, precise distribution of tasks and timely delivery.

Coordination of the personnel, supported by an effortlessly accessible collaboration platform that provides responses and solutions in real time, as well as a strict schedule that aligns with the previously established chain of dependencies at this step, play a leading role.

Clarity of Goals

Project management can only go as far as the project planning allows it to, but neither can provide the wanted result without a clear Objective Statement. Both those responsible for project planning and those allocated with execution need a sharp-cut overview of the project’s ultimate goal, as well as full visibility of consecutive milestones that need to be accomplished in the process.

A pre-arrangement of your management structure is thus crucial not only in terms of gradual project planning, but as a collective incentive for those working on deliverables as well. The importance of goal setting is massive for an impeccable workflow, since a clear objective guarantees a smoother course of action for each team member. By converting initial Objective Statements into a spreadsheet of consecutive milestones, project management tools assure that both individual and overall project goals are clearly visible to everyone on the team at each given moment.

Allocation of Roles & Responsibilities

No matter the scope, complexity or time-sensitivity, almost every project requires a clear allocation of roles and responsibilities and consequently demands a highly intuitive whiteboard to keep all of these assignments neatly organized.

With project management software systems, managers can do all that and more. Specific tasks are being assigned to groups of team members or individuals with only a click, thus forming an inner circle of interchange – a notification is being sent only to those whom it may concern and discussions are restricted only to those currently working together on completing the task – with a possibility of permitting access to other members of the team, should the need arise.

Time Tracking & Productivity

However paramount, great visibility and automated task delegation are not the only perks of automated project management processes. Being the only way of establishing a project timeframe and measuring the time needed for reaching individual milestones, time tracking stands on the other side of effective scheduling, thus making sure that a previously calculated timetable is being honored and all appointed deadlines are being met.

Online time tracking tools are the project managers’ most loyal assistants, since they provide insight into the personal achievements of each team member within a given time frame, track their time on the move, secure quick and easy timesheet entries, alert them of potentially hazardous standstills, allow synchronization of work and encourage productivity in the entire team.

Cloud-Based Accessibility

Being designed and developed to simplify these sensitive management issues with automation, both paid and free online management software systems offer plenty of cloud-based variants that additionally optimize collaboration within a team.

When uploaded to the cloud, all necessary documentation, task schedules and status reports concerning a particular project are accessible to everyone involved, no matter the time or place. As such, these systems allow greater flexibility and real-time data flow, keeping files, reports and discussion boards safe and secured, with punctual delivery accomplished at each phase of project planning, management and execution.

Everything at a Glance

In addition to providing intuitive features for each of the project management phases and requirements individually, project management tools assure efficiency by keeping it all at one place. Instantaneous integration of files and tasks has been made seamless and quick, with social media and blogging calendars included to the project schedule. Most importantly for marketing, these tools serve as unifying platforms, thus allowing effortless tracking of different social media channels, SEO strategies, content generation and blogging projects from a single spot.

Marketing projects usually includes more than just one route of execution, and managing them all simultaneously and efficiently is almost impossible without a little help from automation.

Even the less complicated marketing strategies – and in time of the omnichannel advertising, we can all suppose that those are pretty rare – require a method potent enough to break them down to more manageable units. When employed with such a purpose, project management is the most secure way of building, documenting and delivering marketing campaigns with efficiency, thus making them successful enough to target, generate and convert leads.